In 1943, a scientist, at one remove from the world of biology, gave a series of lectures in Dublin - called provocatively ‘What Is Life?’.
Erwin SchrödIn 1943, a scientist, at one remove from the world of biology, gave a series of lectures in Dublin - called provocatively ‘What Is Life?’.
Erwin Schrödinger, had shared the Nobel prize in physics in 1933 for laying the foundations of wave mechanics. In his Dublin lectures, Schrödinger addressed what puzzled many students — why biology was treated as a subject completely separate from physics and chemistry: frogs, fruit-flies and cells on one side, atoms and molecules, electricity and magnetism, on the other. The time had come, Schrödinger declared, to think of living organisms in terms of their molecular and atomic structure. There was no great divide between the living and non-living; they all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry.
He put a physicist’s question to biology. If entropy is (according to the second law of thermodynamics) things falling apart, the natural disintegration of order into disorder, why don’t genes decay? Why are they instead passed intact from generation to generation? He gave his own answer. ‘Life’ is matter that is doing something. The technical term is metabolism — ‘eating, drinking, breathing, assimilating, replicating, avoiding entropy’. To Schrodinger, life could be defined as ‘negative entropy’ — something not falling into chaos and approaching ‘the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death’. Genes, he said, preserve their structure because the chromosome that carries them is an 'irregular crystal'. The arrangement of units within the crystal constitutes the hereditary code.
The lectures were published as a book the following year, ready for physicists to read just as the war ended and they looked for new frontiers to explore. To this new breed, “What Is Life?” was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of biology — a small book that started a revolution. For post-war physicists, suffering from professional malaise, Schrödinger showed a new way forward - ‘When one of the inventors of quantum mechanics could ask ‘‘What is life?’’, they were confronted with a fundamental problem worthy of their mettle.’ Biological problems could now be tackled with their own language, physics. The first half of the Twentieth-century science belonged to physics, with the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and nuclear fission. The second half would belong to biology....more
Neil deGrasse Tyson is cool. No question. He doesn't pack much into this short book, but whatever he does talk about is always cool. Even too cool somNeil deGrasse Tyson is cool. No question. He doesn't pack much into this short book, but whatever he does talk about is always cool. Even too cool sometimes. Sagan used to awe us with this stuff, but deGrasse Tyson makes it easy to feel like a nerd, by oversimplifying concepts and letting some of his smooth arrogance pass onto the reader.
But, there are always enough nuggets to keep your true inner nerd interested: Like when he explains how Quarks have fractional charges that come in thirds, and that the force that keeps two or more of them together actually grows stronger the more you separate them... Wow, right? And the whole discussion on dark energy and dark matter is the coolest bit, because Tyson is at his best in dealing with still unexplored bits of the subject.
All in all, Tyson's geeky, aloof, arrogant voice remains consistent through this book as well - and those of us who derive pleasure from a likeable know-it-all like Tyson talking down to know-nothings, will enjoy every bit of it. Especially, when the arrogance arising from the backing of science and its capabilities are laced with just the right dose of Sagan-like, pale-blue-dot-like humility about how the arrow of knowledge always gives us humans a smaller and smaller role in the universe....more
Short and sweet. Six extremely brief lessons on six crucial areas of Physics and a final one on where we fit into all of it. Rovelli starts with GenerShort and sweet. Six extremely brief lessons on six crucial areas of Physics and a final one on where we fit into all of it. Rovelli starts with General Relativity and shows us how elegant and simple it is - to re-imagine space as a place that bends, stretches, and interacts with the stars. What a leap of imagination it must have taken to think of emptiness itself as an object which interacts. Rovelli says that that is a key to modern physics, the realization that it is all about interactions and not about absolute properties - maybe all properties arise form interactions and nothing has intrinsic properties?
We move onto quantum mechanics and see how it gradually got muddier - muddy enough that even Einstein, chief-imaginer, couldn’t fathom its weirdness anymore. At this point, the reader would be excused in thinking that each lesson is a bit shorter than warranted… The next lessons takes us to the architecture of the cosmos itself and shows us that unless we figure out a way to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, we will never figure out this weird place we find ourselves in. The sixth lesson about thermodynamics, turns the focus to the grandest mystery of modern science - time. Time might just be an illusion, arising out of our sensory limitations and might require science to allow us to look past it - just like how the movement of the stars and the surface of the earth looked different once we substituted the lens of of our senses with the lens of science. We might learn to ignore time, in time. The last chapter gets a bit fuzzy and philosophical, but that is from where we summon the sense of grandeur required to plod on in the face of all the weirdness that modern science is - to keep exploring this strange, multicolored and astonishing world which we inhabit – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere....more
Can Physics account fully for the mysteries of Biology? This is what Schrödinger wants to know. He ends up writing something half-mystical, half-radicCan Physics account fully for the mysteries of Biology? This is what Schrödinger wants to know. He ends up writing something half-mystical, half-radical and fully-confusing, as Manny says in another review to this book. Now the beauty of any sufficiently confusing book by a good/great scientist is that it is capable of triggering inspiration many times over.
These lectures which are mostly musings on a nascent new branch of science (genetics) in the light of another nascent new branch of science (quantum physics) inspired Haldane, Watson, Crick, Wilkins, etc. to take some of the greatest scientific leaps of the modern world. We shouldn't bet against it inspiring more even today - perhaps the next round of disciples will come from among the ones who pursue AI today? Just a hunch....more
The Earth is Spherical, Small, Mobile (triply so), Certainly Not the Center of the Universe, and thus imperfect from now on.
Having said that, so far aThe Earth is Spherical, Small, Mobile (triply so), Certainly Not the Center of the Universe, and thus imperfect from now on.
Having said that, so far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from Science, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell....more
It is an increasingly accepted speculation that souls might in fact be made of dark matter. According to our latest models, they (daOur Souls are Dark
It is an increasingly accepted speculation that souls might in fact be made of dark matter. According to our latest models, they (dark souls) condense first and allow life to settle down around them. Of course, they can't be detected since they are not detectable by ordinary matter science.
On death, the souls depart from the body, and can go to heaven/cause rebirth via re-agglomeration depending on religious practices of the ordinary matter person associated with the soul. It is not yet fully understood how religious practices affect the dark matter core of a person. However, we do know that the souls get affected by a lifetime of sins, penance, charity, etc.
It is accepted by now that no life can form without a dark soul though some scientists still like the older idea that a soul is required only for higher life forms, probably only humans. Lower life forms can agglomerate without the gravitational-religious pull exerted by the soul-core. The source of this mysterious force that is akin to gravity but applies only to life-forms is yet to be discovered. It is exciting to consider that life might be the only source of interaction between dark and ordinary matter, outside the even more mysterious realm of gravity.
This allows us to speculate that ghosts might be real. In certain religions, certain required practices being not performed would mean that the soul-core is not fully freed from its person-form. This makes it unstable and dangerous, in a limbo state between dark and ordinary matter, and causes it to react in unpredictable ways with ordinary matter - sometimes violating the laws of ordinary matter physics. It is not entirely clear how this comes about.
Dark matter souls normally interact with entirely new forces and particles that do not interact with ordinary matter. But it has been observed over time that religion can have an effect on this. It is a matter of great speculation how nature of reality is altered by the gravitational-religious forces that seem to transcend the dark-ordinary boundary and allow some diffuse interactions. A new temple is proposed to be built near CERN to test the interactions and to identify the carriers of these interactions. We anxiously await the results. We are also hoping to bump into a few celebrity souls/ghosts over there. It is a whole new world that awaits us!...more
In this series of seven easy-going essays Lightman uses musings on the many curious aspects of modern Physics and the way they cha The Amusing Universe
In this series of seven easy-going essays Lightman uses musings on the many curious aspects of modern Physics and the way they change our perspectives - not to discuss Science, but to philosophize on Life. Surprisingly, the most unintuitive parts of Physics are pretty normal when it comes to Life. Perhaps because we expected more order from Science than was there in the first place, more than the Universe was ever willing to give us. We can come away from these musings with the pleasant yet unsettling feeling that most likely all of Science is going to turn out to be as messy as our everyday life of dealing with stuff like ethics and responsibilities. That should be fun.
The musings take unexpected turns, almost Montaigne-like in their capacity for starting in one place and veering sharply off the track:
1. The Accidental Universe: Uses the fact that most of the physical conditions that allowed this universe to sustain life or even exist could be purely accidental (the multiverse conjecture) and thus goes onto to wonder about the beauty and randomness of our lives on this small speck of dust. 2. The Temporary Universe: Looks at the eternal human quest for immortality and permanence in everything in the midst of decay by looking at the radical impermanence of everything in the physical universe. 3. The Spiritual Universe: Understands the human quest to go beyond the natural laws by peeking behind the actual laws of the universe. Perhaps the universe too is beyond mere laws? (Plenty of sharp digs at Dawkins here. Don't miss the fun!) 4. The Symmetrical Universe: Equates the human and the cosmos in their shared appreciation and fascination of symmetry. Maybe the mind is the cosmos… 5. The Gargantuan Universe: The immensity of the universe and the impossibility of grasping it is compared with our inborn tendency to shoot big. But most likely the universe is too big for our comprehension, but then, what is not?
6. The Lawful Universe: The human mind is evolved to seek out laws. Any organism in a lawful corner of the universe has to be born with this tendency to be able to manipulate surroundings or survive, propagate, etc in any meaningful way. But should we really be projecting this tendency onto the entire breadth of the universe? To the Multiverse? To the beginnings and endings?
We spontaneously see people as purposeful, and this is the central act of the practical imagination required for social interaction of any sort. We extended this to the physical world. This was the origin and basis of religion - and that is now considered superstition.
Similarly we accord laws spontaneously to the perceivable physical world, which in fact does behave predictably - at least as far as the physical world of our senses is concerned. This is the origin and basis of science. But to extend that to the rest of the universe, macro and micro, is that also not a form of superstition then?
7. The Disembodied Universe: The universe requires us to think conceptually.Nt a single important fact about the physical universe is immediate anymore. A disembodied universe can only be understood by an imaginative species. ALien intelligent life might be more common than we are brought up to believe, but how common would imaginative intelligence be out there?
In the end though, the essays are too wise to be as much fun as Einstein’s Dreams. And that is the benchmark for Lightman.
- Read Rees' book thoroughly. - Write an essay in appreciation that elucidates the Cosmology 101
[Strictly for Cosmology amateurs]
Syllabus as follows:
- Read Rees' book thoroughly. - Write an essay in appreciation that elucidates the crucial importance of physical constants. - Submit three reports on the current state of understanding and how they have evolved in any of the major constants touched upon in the book - Bonus assignment: Search out one popular science book that has managed to cover in 100s of pages what Rees covers with lucidity in a few scores. - Extra Bonus Assignment: Pop over and read Prof. Manny's and Trevor's goodreads pieces and present your thoughts concisely (in less than 100 words) as comments. If either of them considers your comment intelligent enough to reply to, you can be sure of an A.
Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. ~ Allan SandagScience cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. ~ Allan Sandage, the father of modern astronomy
The author basically takes this one question and runs around brandishing it at books, pubs and at author interviews. If you are curious to see how people like Parfit, Penrose, Weinberg and even Updike think outside of their books, some of the chapters here could be fun reads. And to be honest, after all the conversations with the Physicists, the one where Updike tries to sound all scienc-ey feels a bit, what can I say, philistine? To be honest, this is as much as you will get from the book. After all the author had no real hope of tackling his real objective, and we know it all along.
Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. ~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary...more
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